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Pepper Spray at UC Davis

There were a few possible reactions to the police repeatedly pepper spraying a seated row of non-violent student protesters at an Occupy Wall Street-inspired event at UC Davis on Saturday. The university Chancellor, Linda Katehi, apologized to her students for the attack. The university put two officers on leave while investigating their behavior. Protesters were outraged.

Personally, I was disgusted, especially because the videos and articles about police pepper spraying students in our country are appearing at the same time as the army in Egypt brutalizes demonstrators there. The two are not equivalent, by any stretch, but the juxtaposition is unfortunate, to say the least.

The most disturbing reaction I think I’ve read about the incident was this: “What I’m looking at is fairly standard police procedure.”

That was from Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who, according to the AP, wrote that department’s use of force manual. He said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” and that he observed at least two cases of “active resistance.”

Did we watch the same video? I saw a bunch of kids locking arms on the ground and police in riot gear moving around freely. Then I saw a cop with an oddly calm expression spray the kids in the face. More than once. I don’t think that’s “active resistance,” and the 9th Circuit —which has ruled that it’s excessive to use pepper spray against seated, peaceful protesters—wouldn’t call it that, either.

So if that’s “fairly standard police procedure,” we need a new standard.

Don’t let the word “pepper” deceive you; the spray does not go well on salad with olive oil. It is not, as Megyn Kelly said on Fox Monday night, “a food product, essentially.” A post on Scientific American describes how it “induces a burning sensation in the eyes in part by damaging cells in the outer layer of the cornea…[and] with repeated exposures…there can be permanent damage to the cornea.” It also inflames “the airways, causing swelling and restriction” posing a “genuine risk to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.” In the mid-1990s, after the American Civil Liberties Union of California compiled a report on the subject, the Department of Justice “cited nearly 70 fatalities linked to pepper-spray use.”

Police departments nationally need to rethink their pepper-spray policies, or better train officers in how to put these policies into practice. What happened at UC Davis makes that abundantly clear.

And while they’re at it someone should have a word with the New York Police Department about the First Amendment. As The Times’s letter to the Department outlines, police in our hometown have been abusing journalists, as well as protesters.

This kind of behavior is wrong, legally and morally. It’s also self-defeating if the purpose is to quash demonstrations. Look at Chicago in 1968, at the streets of Southern cities in the 1960’s. Tear gas, fire hoses and dogs just show how right the protesters are and inspire more.